Comics stenography at Fort York’s barracks: October 22, 2007

Comics stenography at Fort York’s barracks: October 22, 2007

Confused? Me too, a little bit.

On October 22, the Trampoline Hall lecture series is temporarily uprooting itself and moving to Fort York’s barracks – and they’re going to try something unprecedented with a bunch of comics artists (including me and Mike).

Sean Craig tells me “Trampoline Hall is a very famous literary salon where non-experts talk about subjects they are obsessed with. It was created by Sheila Heti, who is a very famous author. In trying to find new ways to document these lectures, we’re going to make the first ever attempt at comics stenography— having a bunch of cartoonists and comics artists in our audience trying to capture the event literally or figuratively in comics form as it happens. Whether they go straight to comics, take notes, do sketches and work from there, use speech bubbles or not is totally up to them. No one, our research tells us, has ever done this before. You can go narrative, you can go documentary, you can go experimental, you can go anywhere. Wherever you go, Maissoneuve in Canada and McSweeneys in the United States are going to help us publish the results of the experiment for our own fun and for the artists’ benefit.”

Leah Buckareff will be talking about Hyperbolic Crochet.

Waylen Miki will be talking about Robotism.

Jacob Zimmer will be talking about Diverse Curiosity.

Becky Johnson, the show’s curator, will be turning our comics into a little zine in time for Canzine, which happens six days after the show. The Beguiling will stock this print for the rest of the world’s eyes, and Valerie Howes at Maissoneuve is going to push for publication in the comics-friendly Montreal-based mag.

The event is October 22nd at Fort York at 8pm sharp. I’m going to show up with pencil, pens, and paper, and see what happens. I have no idea what to expect, but what the heck.